Dave Hand was born on January 23, 1900, in Plainfield New Jersey. He attended the Art Institute of Chicago before return-ing to the East Coast and beginnreturn-ing his career in animation at the J. R. Bray Studio. Hand later worked for Max Fleischer on the Out of the Inkwell series. He came to California to con-sider live-action filmmaking but returned to animation, this time with the Walt Disney Studios. He joined the staff in 1930, animating on more than forty shorts, including The Chain Gang (1930), Traffic Troubles (1931), and Flowers and Trees. He began directing in 1932 with Trader Mickey (1932) and continued as Walt Disney’s first director on Building a Building (1933), Pluto’s Judgment Day (1933), Who Killed Cock Robin? (1935), Thru the Mirror (1936), Little Hiawatha (1937), and many more. Walt assigned Dave to be supervising director of the studio’s first animated feature, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. After that triumph, Dave performed the same role for Bambi and then served as animation supervisor on Victory through Air Power before leaving the studio for an animation opportunity in Eng-land. Dave died on October 11, 1986, and was named a Disney Legend in 1994.
An interesting aspect of memory is how each person remembers events differently. While Dave recalls accepting criticism from Walt at previews, whether deserving or not, Ben Sharpsteen, in Working with Walt: Interviews with Disney Artists, recalls Dave trying to flee from a disappointing preview early, only to be stopped by Walt as he attempted to leave the theater parking lot in his car.
I interviewed Dave Hand through correspondence dated September 7, 1979. He was hesitant to participate in a face-to-face interview, and as consequence of that reluctance and my budget constraints, I never met him in person. Needless to say, I wish I had.
D P : As a director of shorts and feature films, you worked closely with
Walt Disney. Was it difficult for you to keep up with his innovations and experimentations? Was it difficult to follow his lead?
D H : No, it was not difficult for me to keep up with Walt Disney’s
innova-tions and experimentainnova-tions. No, it was not difficult to follow his lead.
Sometimes it was difficult for him to know just where he himself was going—he would be trying to get a handle on his dreams.
D P : How did you happen to go to work for Walt Disney?
D H : I left New York to go to Hollywood to look the live-action situation
over. It didn’t look so good, so I applied at Disney.
D P : What were your first impressions of Walt? Did they change over the
years?
D H : My first impressions of Walt were that “he was always right.” Even
if I didn’t think he was—but I had enlisted to learn his way of doing things, so I followed his wishes.
D P : As a supervising director of Snow White, did your approach vary
greatly from the supervision or direction of shorts? In other words, how
does one go about directing the first animated feature? Were you allowed much latitude, or did Walt monitor all that you did?
D H : No, my approach did not vary in my supervision of Snow White—
there was simply greater scope. Snow White was really a group of shorts (which were sequences of Snow White), so the only added problem was to hold it all together as a unified whole. I was allowed full latitude on all details of production—Walt monitored the results from Story to Preview.
D P : As one of the “New York animators,” was it difficult to adjust to the
Disney approach to the production of animated cartoons?
D H : The only difficulty in “adjusting” to the Disney approach was that
there was no acceptance of slipshod animation (as there had been in New York) and no thought of cost relative to quality.
D P : How did the Disney Studio compare to other animation studios
where you have worked?
D H : I saw no difference in working at the Disney Studio except as noted
above.
D P : I have heard several accounts of Walt’s on-the-spot evaluations at
previews of shorts that disappointed him. Did these sessions create a great deal of anxiety?
D H : Walt’s evaluations at previews of shorts that disappointed him didn’t
bother me. I knew that those I directed had certain weaknesses, which were evident after a preview. If criticism came my way, I sat quietly and took it—whether it was justified or not.
D P : As one of the first directors in a constantly evolving medium, how
did you coordinate the work of animators? As the art of animation became more sophisticated, did you supervise animators differently, or was your approach to direction basically the same?
D H : I think coordinating the work of animators took care of itself. All
of us had complete dedication to Walt and the medium, and because of this we were all anxious to help each other get the very best results. As a director, I never thought I was in any way superior to the animator
(and certainly did not act it). It was teamwork—animators helped ani-mators, directors helped aniani-mators, and animators helped directors—
total unity.
I always considered animators—each one separately—as marvel-ous human beings with wonderful ideas (some maybe not so good as others—the ideas, I mean) and always encouraged them not to take a scene until they were completely satisfied that it worked. And besides, they were all I had to “get it on the screen”!
I never changed my basis for directing—I only worked to get better at it.
D P : What was it like for you to work at the Disney Studio during the
1930s and early 1940s, the period historians generally regard as the Golden Age of Animation?
D H : For me, working at the Disney Studio was an intense
twenty-four-hour-a-day experience, with ever-new challenges always over the hori-zon. The problem for me (and I suppose for all of us) was that there wasn’t any way that we would know whether something was good or bad until the idea was shown to the theater audience (and then it was too late to correct—that is, if it were bad). There seemed always to be a struggle to make an idea work—from story to final animation approval.
There just wasn’t any way to positively know whether the idea was going to get over. It would be only through experience and a sixth sense (which Walt had in abundance) that could in a manner assure some measure of success. Even so, we weren’t always right (including Walt) in the way we presented an idea.
Speaking only for myself, as I gained experience, I would never take an idea that I was responsible for putting on the screen (whether when I was an animator and later when I was a director) until I was satisfied that it would work. When I became a director, I encouraged my anima-tors to do the same thing. When I was an animator, I would argue with the director until the idea was somehow changed so that I would be happy with it—and when I became a director, I would argue with the story men (including Walt) until the idea was acceptable to me. How-ever much Walt fussed about my approach if his idea and mine didn’t
agree, I’m quite sure he secretly liked it. Why else did he select me to direct Snow White?
D P : On Snow White, animators were cast by characters, but on Bambi, the
film was broken down by sequences, and any animator could animate any character. What kind of problems did these two approaches pose for you as the supervising director? Did you prefer one approach to the other?
D H : I don’t think you have your conclusions altogether right about the
casting of animators on either Snow White or Bambi. Animators were selected for their type (style) of animation. Those animators whose style seemed to be compatible with the particular character(s) would be given key scenes in order to establish (for all the animators) a basis for the personality of the character because the character would be used in many scenes (say) throughout the picture. All key men would confer back and forth about all characters, but usually one guy would be the “authority”
on his character. This was the general plan, although sometimes it was altered. This would be my approach.
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